


Love and Poetry

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:30:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18491389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: Mulder and Scully read to each other in bed sometimes.





	Love and Poetry

**i.**  “Mulder,” she whispers. “Mulder?”

He grunts in reply, pulling the covers over his head as his semi-consciousness clashes full force against her bedside lamp. 

“Have you read  _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?”_ She asks, an errant hand reaching over to trace swirls behind his ear, down his neck. More grunting. “It is, I think, the most powerful narrative I’ve ever read. One of the most lasting and universally understood depictions of life and the living of it. The real living of it, you know?” She rests her hand on his head, her fingers lying in his hair, hiding in the strands. Her fingerprints meet his follicles and yet he does not stir.

 _“’People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,’ thought Francie,”_ she whispers. _“‘Something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.’”_

He makes no noise, but he scoots closer to her, the length of his back pressing against her thigh as she reads. She closes the book for a moment and turns to him fully, propping herself up on an elbow to trace the words on his bare back.  _Those things,_ she writes.  _You you you._ Oh how far away happiness had felt, and now it was so close she could touch it in her last waking moments, in the most vulnerable and intangible of times, where happiness really lives. She curls up behind him, book abandoned, and relishes in her shelter from the rain, her strong cup of coffee, her someone to love. 

 

 **ii.**   _“Let us go then, you and I,”_ he recites, lounging with his book of poems propped up beneath her breasts. “ _When the evening is spread out against the sky.”_ She spreads her fingers through his hair and he sighs.

 _“Like a patient etherized upon a table?”_ She fills, and he looks at her like she puts in the stars in the sky because god dammit, she really does. 

 _“Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, t_ _he muttering retreats o_ _f restless nights in one-night cheap hotels a_ _nd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.”_ She laughs then, the rippling of her stomach muscles jostling his book and warming his heart. 

“I think we can speak to cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants, can’t we?” He closes the book for a moment just to rest his chin in the hollow of her sternum. He admires the curve of her jaw from this angle before she tucks her chin to meet his gaze. 

 _Do I dare d_ _isturb the universe?_ He skips ahead in his mind, deciding that, should he move from this very position, the universe may just collapse in on itself, perfectly aligned as it is right now. So he remains.  _There will be time, there will be time._ The time is now, the time is always, the time is theirs and he is dumbfounded at the sheer luck of it all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt credit to @softnow on tumblr


End file.
